The National Hockey League is known for being made up primarily of foreign players. In fact, as of 2017, Americans only made up about a quarter of NHL players. With the NHL’s statistics on players with nationalities outside of the United States, it strikes the thought on if that has any impact on their skill as a hockey player.
Rob Villman provides the public with a full NHL dataset from the 2017-2018 season, covering nearly every statistic regarding the analytics behind hockey. It’s this dataset that is used to analyze the correlation between the nationality of players and their ability to play.
Villman’s dataset includes every center, right wing, left wing, and defensive player on a roster in the 2017-2018 NHL season. Since this is such a large amount of data, the teams were narrowed down to just official current United Stated based teams. Therefore, all Canada-based teams and the Seattle expansion team were excluded from the analysis. This left 24 teams with about 20-23 active players per team. The data set was then split into the teams and from there, split into positions; center, right wing, left wing, and defense. Each player was measured by two variables; their +/- and their total points scored in the season. The total points scored measures actual goals and assists. Since hockey positions are so flexible between offense and defense statistics, this is the easiest and most consistent way to measure player’s success in the league. Once the bases of those graphs were built, color was added to show the nationality of the player. The charts show the number of players based on nationality and the audience is able to compare them with each other.
Overall, the hypothesis is proven semi-correct. For the majority of the teams, the players have a Canadian nationality. Therefore, removing teams based in Canada was a good idea if the goal is to look at the foreign population. With that, the conclusion can be drawn that generally, most NHL players who do not have a nationality of the US have better general statistics. This report, though, only covers the surface level of NHL analytics. For a more in-depth review, there would be more statistical analysis with specific stats on the differing positions. However, this report moderately satisfies the hypothesis of foreign-nationality based players having more positive statistics in the NHL.